My New Book

It’s called Simple eBook Formatting for the Technophobic Author, available for Amazon Kindle and priced at only $2.99. Please grab a copy if you think it might be useful to you!

Here’s the description on the book’s Amazon page

So you’ve finished your manuscript. Congratulations! Now it’s time to turn your words into an electronic version that can be read worldwide on an array of eReading devices. Hopefully it will turn your hard work and inspiration into a source of supplementary income–anything from latte money to those rare and lucky people who can quit their day jobs and write full-time.

You could pay someone to do this for you, but why waste money, and take all the creative power out of your hands, when you can do it yourself?

The process of ePublishing is free, and though it is a little tedious, it’s not particularly difficult. What is difficult is wading through endless ePublishing web forums and bulky Formatting Guides and confusing Help and About sections to figure out where to publish, how to format your eBooks, and how to upload and manage them.

Luckily author Pamela Olson, who has six eBooks to her name, found a way to streamline the process considerably. She presents it here for you for the bargain price of only $2.99. It’s virtually guaranteed to save you many hours (possibly days, and maybe even an ulcer or two). No prior knowledge is required other than a working knowledge of Microsoft Word and internet web browsing.

Simple doesn’t mean ‘plain,’ however. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create, upload, and manage eBooks that include:

Once you master the techniques outlined in this guide, there will be plenty of room for adding your own personal flair to the design of your books. You’ll also learn about the benefits and downsides of the various ePublishing platforms, how the pay structures work, and how to track sales and royalties. And the Resources section at the end points you toward your next step: Marketing!

From the Author

By now, I’ve published six eBooks, and formatting and uploading them is a piece of cake.

But when I first got started last year, I had to wade through a bewildering array of help pages and tutorials. Most of the free formatting guides were bulky, inelegant, difficult to follow, and geared toward steering the user toward one ePublisher or another.

It was hard to find objective comparisons of the various publishing platforms, and once I hunted through endless blogs and forums and chose the platforms that worked best for me, it was another huge headache to figure out how to format my manuscript for each of them. The free formatting guides and help pages were either bulked up with information I didn’t need or stripped down to the point where it was practically useless. I was at my wits’ end trying to sort everything out. It literally took weeks.

Well, it shouldn’t have. And it doesn’t have to take weeks for you.

After I finally mastered the complicated ways they wanted me to format my eBooks, I discovered several steps that were unnecessary or overly belabored. When it was time to publish my next eBooks, I eliminated or streamlined them. Now, for me, publishing a robust and elegant eBook is a simple matter of a couple of hours of work that is, to be sure, somewhat tedious, but it’s no longer difficult or frustrating.

I’m writing this guide to bring this same experience to you, along with information on how to upload and manage your new eBooks. It’s one-stop shopping for anyone who wants to publish their first eBook.

Readers are also welcome to email me if they have any questions or frustrations (my email address is included in the guide). I’ll do my best to help, and also to continually update and improve this guide.